Hawking: John Paul tried to discourage me

Physicist says pope against study on universe's start.

Physicist says pope against study on universe's start.

June 16, 2006

HONG KONG (AP) -- Famed physicist Stephen Hawking said Thursday that Pope John Paul II tried to discourage him and other scientists attending a cosmology conference at the Vatican from trying to figure out how the universe began. The British scientist joked he was lucky the pope didn't realize he had already presented a paper at the gathering suggesting how the universe was created. "I didn't fancy the thought of being handed over to the Inquisition like Galileo," Hawking said in a lecture to a sold-out audience at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. John Paul died in 2005; Hawking did not say when the Vatican meeting was held. Galileo ran afoul of the Roman Catholic Church in the 17th century for supporting Copernicus' discovery that the Earth revolved around the sun. The church insisted the Earth was at the center of the universe. In 1992, John Paul issued a declaration saying the church's denunciation of Galileo was an error resulting from "tragic mutual incomprehension." Hawking said the pope told the scientists, "It's OK to study the universe and where it began. But we should not inquire into the beginning itself because that was the moment of creation and the work of God." The physicist, author of the best seller "A Brief History of Time," added that John Paul believed "God chose how the universe began for reasons we could not understand." John Paul insisted faith and science could coexist. In 1996, in a message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, he said that Darwin's theories were sound as long as they took into account that creation was the work of God and that Darwin's theory of evolution was "more than a hypothesis." But Hawking questioned whether an almighty power was needed to create the universe. "Does it require a creator to decree how the universe began? Or is the initial state of the universe determined by a law of science?" he asked.